[QGIS-Developer] Reducing the size of our download packages

Fri May 15 09:11:56 PDT 2026

Regarding this thread, I just spotted today that it is still possible to get a standalone Windows installer that includes the grids from the downloads page.

https://qgis.org/resources/installation-guide/#offline-standalone-installers

Thank you for making this available.

John

From: QGIS-Developer <qgis-developer-bounces at lists.osgeo.org> On Behalf Of Régis Haubourg via QGIS-Developer
Sent: 24 March 2026 12:38
To: Nyall Dawson <nyall.dawson at gmail.com>
Cc: qgis-developer <qgis-developer at lists.osgeo.org>
Subject: Re: [QGIS-Developer] Reducing the size of our download packages

Haaa laughing of myself :)

Sorry for the noise.

Bien cordialement,

Régis Haubourg
On 24/03/2026 12:02, Nyall Dawson wrote:

On Tue, 24 Mar 2026, 8:02 pm Régis Haubourg via QGIS-Developer, <qgis-developer at lists.osgeo.org<mailto:qgis-developer at lists.osgeo.org>> wrote:

Maybe we could add a mechanism where proj grid files can be imported to the user profile, so any user could download grids.

Well, we already have https://github.com/qgis/QGIS/pull/31622

Is that what you mean?

Nyall

Some caveats to avoid with multi profile management. I'd be in favor of storing proj grids once per user $APPDATA profile, not in each QGIS profile

Bien cordialement,

Régis Haubourg
On 24/03/2026 10:29, Matthias Kuhn via QGIS-Developer wrote:
Hi all,

Thanks for raising this discussion, Tim.
There recently was a discussion about that on a github issue.
The new macOS packages didn't ship grid packages out of the box in the beginning and this was a blocker for some users so I ended up bundling the data files again with the macOS packages. The full discussion can be seen here https://github.com/qgis/QGIS/issues/64486

Key takeaways for me: If we want to split this apart, we need to make it very easy for users to install missing bits, the current process would need some improvements. If this is shipped as a separate installer package, we need to make sure it works across all platforms.

Kind regards
Matthias

On Tue, Mar 24, 2026 at 9:33 AM Alexander Bruy via QGIS-Developer <qgis-developer at lists.osgeo.org<mailto:qgis-developer at lists.osgeo.org>> wrote:
If I'm not wrong, our standalone installer is based on the OSGeo4W and installs the latter. So users can easily
use the OSGeo4W installer to download any additional dependencies they want/need.

Another option would be to add an option to the standalone installer to download grids, similarly to what we had
in the old NSIS installer for Alaska dataset.

пн, 23 бер. 2026 р. о 09:20 Tim Sutton via QGIS-Developer <qgis-developer at lists.osgeo.org<mailto:qgis-developer at lists.osgeo.org>> пише:
Hi all

Here in the infrastructure management club for QGIS we have been embarking on a plan to slowly divest ourselves of 'big tech'. At the end of last year we switched off cloudflare CDN and implemented our own caching servers. At that time we were doing around 130TB of throughput (including what was being soaked up by Cloudflare). As of last month we did 430TB of throughput without the help of Cloudflare.

We are trying to optimise costs - that bandwidth alone cost us in the neighbourhood of 500€ per month. To reduce costs we can approach the problem in two way:

1. optimise the infrastructure - we (QGIS Devops team) are busy looking into ways to do that...
2. reduce the download size...

We are wondering if the datum shift files could be split out from the main installer and fetched as an optional extra? Or maybe on demand as you need them? We could set up some infrastructure for hosting them, but we would need some help on the application side to implement logic to go and grab shift files that are not locally cached. Is anyone able to help with this?

Regards

Tim

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